“As
he wounded me with one hand, so he healed me with the other”: The Dual
and Dueling
Narrative Voices in The
Sovereignty and Goodness of God and The
Narrative of Robert AdamsBy
Brandon Weaver, University
of Washington, Seattle

The
genre of the captivity narrative, through the 17th and 18th centuries,
covered
an expansive geo-cultural area and throughout that time, developed
several
interesting conventions. One of the most intriguing of these
conventions is the
tendency of many narratives to exhibit multiple voices within a single
work.
While the specific significance of this multiplicity varies from text
to text,
the dual (and dueling) voices are consistently indicative of a desire
to
propagate “the captives’ histories for didactic purposes of their own.”[1]
Though written nearly 150 years apart, this
dual presence of authorship is evident in both Mary Rowlandson’s The
sovereignty and goodness of God and Robert Adam’s The narrative of
Robert Adams.[2]
Both narratives were sponsored by a dominant group who then manipulated
the
text to serve their own interests. Ultimately, the shift in the aim of
these
interests signifies a shift in geo-political policy, consistently
promoting
increasingly imperialistic ideologies.

While
it is unclear exactly how much authorial control Mary Rowlandson had
over her
narrative, it is clear that there are two main voices. The dominant
voice,
potentially penned by the Mathers who sponsored the narratives’
publication,
represented the Puritan community, utilizing scripture and giving the
events of
the narrative meaning in relationship to the word and will of God. The
second
voice is that Rowlandson herself and represents a profound “emphasis on
personal agency,” in both physical needs and “in the workings of
salvation.”[3]
The conflict of narrative’s subtext is
carefully, though not entirely subtly, situated on the fault line
between these
two voices, each one vying for a claim on the reader’s
interpretation.

Since
the text was written for an entirely Puritan audience, it is not
surprising
that the scriptural voice would have a dominant presence in the
narrative. In
fact, the scripture in The
sovereignty and
goodness of God is nearly ubiquitous, highlighting the
events of the
narrative through reflection and instruction. Outside of the narrative,
for the
Puritan reader, the scripture held three functions. First, through
sheer
number, the scripture demonstrates that the hand of God is in
everything. As
Rowlandson crosses a river, she quotes, “When thou passeth through the
waters,
I will be with thee.”[4]
Later she generalizes this sentiment, citing
“Shall there be evil in the city, and the Lord hath not done it?”
demonstrating
that that God is ultimately in control, even of evil, and therefore
scripture
can be applied at any moment.[5]
It is important for the scriptural voice to
reinforce this point, as one of the explicit purposes of the narrative
as a
whole is to explicate Rowlandson’s captivity in terms of God’s
Will.

Secondly,
the scripture demonstrates the healing power of the Bible and to this
end
Rowlandson references many Psalms, which often have to do with
suffering and
are meant to uplift. Thirdly and most importantly, the scripture serves
to
legitimize the narrative as a rebuke by giving it God’s authority
rather than relying
on that of human’s. In this way, the narrative functions as a Jeremiad,
which
“accused New England of backsliding from the high ideals and noble
achievements
of the founders, of God’s evident or impending wrath, and of the need
for
immediate and thorough reformation.”[6]
To this end, Rowlandson writes “I saw how in
my walk with God, I had been a careless creature,” citing the verse
“Father I
have sinned against heaven and in thy sight,” in order to draw a
parallel
between her plight and spiritual shortcoming, which by association,
asserts her
community’s spiritual shortcoming.[7]
Ultimately, the effect of all three of these
functions is to demonstrate the benefit of immersing oneself in the
awareness
of God and thereby to warn the community of the dangers from straying
from the
‘hedge’ both physically and spiritually. In this sense, the
documentation of
affliction was to meant to “call [the Mathers’] congregations and the
entire
community back to the founding covenant.”[8]
This covenant “depended on the entire
company’s adherence to the community.[9]
In this formulation, a single member’s error
was cause for punishment of the entire colony. The scriptural voice of
the
narrative emphasizes this with the first sentence of ‘The First
Remove,’
reading “now away we
must go with those barbarous
creatures.”[10]
Here, the ‘we’ of the sentence serves to
include the Puritan reader in the sense of affliction and thereby
promote and
maintain the corporate covenant. Effectively, the to the Puritans,
their
community represented a sort of New-Israel, as God’s chosen people and
underlying this belief was the doctrine of corporate covenant, that
“God…would
protect and prosper His newly chosen people—if they
remained true to His laws and steadfast in their faith.”[11]
To this end, the Mathers would instruct those who left the ‘hedge’ of
the
“horrors they might encounter as punishment for their restlessness and
inconsistency.”[12]

Mary
Rowlandson being taken prisoner. From A Narrative of the Captivity,
Sufferings, and Removes, of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (Boston:
Thomas and Fleet, 1791), 1.Image Source: Internet Archive

It
is in this instruction that the duel of the voices is centered. While
the most
obvious ‘other’ in the narrative is the ‘heathen’ Native Americans,
Fitzpatrick
notes that Rowlandson “relied on two such “others”.” [13]
In opposition to the Mathers’ attempts to
“enforce boundaries,” Rowlandson “came instead to explode them, to
sanction the
venture of the individual into the wilderness.”
[14]
Ironically, the very detachment from the ‘hedge’ allowed her to be
tested and
reassure herself of her salvation, providing a level of experience of
the
‘sovereignty and goodness of God’ that the community could not equal.
Rowlandson’s depiction of the wilderness as a catalyst for individual
redemption,
then, embodied the heart of the narrative’s subversive
implications.

It
is probable that the Mathers were aware of this conflict as they
attempted to
address it, “at once decrying the sinfulness of the generation that had
tempted
God’s fury by straying from the ‘hedge’ of the covenanted community and
then
extolling the enlightenment accessible only to those whom God had
chosen to try
by fire in the wilderness.” [15]
The scriptural voice attempts to resolve this
conflict as Rowlandson writes that, though she deserved worse
punishment, “the
Lord showed mercy to me and upheld me, as He wounded me with one hand,
so He
healed me with the other.” [16]
The Mathers, however, never moved any further
than this vague ambivalence and any sense of resolution fades alongside
Rowlandson’s sensational acts of individualism.

Rowlandson’s
very survival depended in large part, on her ability to make clothes,
which not
only made her worth keeping to the natives, but also allowed her to
barter for
food. This coupled with other sensational individual acts like stealing
food
from a child to avoid starvation, represented a radical departure from
the
communal structure of the Puritan congregation. Furthermore, regardless
of the
degree, the fact that Rowlandson is the first person narrator the story
challenges the “traditionally masculine authority and authorship
central to
Puritan sexual order.” [17]
Rowlandson’s womanhood was a threat to both
the gendered hierarchy of the Puritan society and the gendered rhetoric
of a
‘virgin’ forest; “the atomizing tendencies of the women’s narratives
had
challenged the theological unity of the community.” [18]
In danger of losing control as the rudder of
Puritan theology, Cotton Mather responded to these threats by revising
“the
national covenant so as to de-emphasize the collective meaning of
personal
affliction and to stress instead its importance in the individual drama
of
redemption or in the national drama of self preservation.” [19]

Thus,
the dual voices of Mathers and Rowlandson represent a conflict of
dueling
soteriological philosophies. On one hand, the Mathers’ dominant and
explicit
ideology of corporate covenant, as symbolized by the ‘hedge’ of the
church, was
challenged on the other hand, by a subversive and implicit ideology of
individual,
unmediated salvation found in the wilderness. In order to maintain
control of
the Puritan community, the Mathers reconfigured the role of the
wilderness and
expanded the scope of the dominant voice in the narratives, ultimately
prefiguring the trend of national discourse about international
conflict that
pervaded future captivity narratives.

This
international discourse is evidenced by the fact that “at the time of
the war
for in independence,” obviously a time of international conflict,
“colonists
increasingly viewed themselves as captives to a tyrannical king…and
Indian
captivity narratives…enjoyed a renewed readership.” [20]
Alongside this new reading of the narrative,
the Barbary captivity displayed international tension and “invoked
public
subscriptions for ransom funds, forced the government to pay
humiliating
tributes in cash and military arms to African rulers…and brought about
the
first postrevolutionary [U.S.] war.” [21]
In this sense, they were truly international
accounts and The
narrative
of Robert Adams is no
exception. While within the plot of the narrative Adams was neither
“held
hostage by a nation seeking tribute,” nor concerned with national
profit
himself, the national interest disseminated from the sponsors of the
narrative,
the London based African Company [22]
who wished to gather information about the
fabled city of wealth, ‘Tombuctoo,’ to which Adams had traveled.
[23]

“Adams is
discovered in the Tent with Isha,” from Charles Ellms,
Robinson Crusoe's own book; or, The voice of adventure, from the
civilized man cut off from his fellows, by force, accident, or
inclination, and from the wanderer in strange seas and lands
(Boston: J.V. Pierce, 1843), 425.Image
Source: Google Books

It
is to this economic end that narrative is directed, rather than
spiritual, as
the complete absence of scripture highlights the largest difference
between the
later Barbary narrative and the earlier captivity narratives. Although
Adams
refuses to renounce his religion for that of the ‘Mahometan’, unlike
the other
‘white’ captives, Williams and Davidson, this decision is more akin to
individualism and aversion to the ‘other’ rather than devout faith.
[24] Joseph
Dupuis, the author of footnotes of the narrative, admits that he
“had
difficulty at first believing [Adams] a Christian.” [25]
In fact, Adams hardly practices his religion,
described as “a Christian, who never prayed,” and much more than that,
one who
had affairs with married women as the “narrative strongly implies that
he
seduced his master’s wife.” [26]
Instead of relying on scripture as a
justification for the text, “the message of this Barbary captivity
story is
subsumed by the recorder’s devotion not to Adams’ personal experience
as a
captive but to the recorder’s concern for accurate information about
Timbuktu.” [27]
In this way, without a scriptural backbone
driving the dominant voice of the text, Robert Adams’ narrative becomes
a piece
of imperial propaganda promoting the search, and presumably occupation,
of
African countries for wealth.

Though
Adams’ narrative was the only Barbary captivity narrated by and
African-American, this is only barely true, as the story is heavily
mediated
and told in the third person through a white member of the African
Company. It
is in this narrative conquest that the dual and dueling voices become
apparent.
Baepler summarizes the conflict of the two narrative implications,
writing,
“while eventually presented as the ostensible memoir of an American in
Africa,
the narrative actually stages a larger drama about racial struggle.”
[28]
In this sense, replacing the scriptural dominant voice, is an imperial
dominant
voice with the events of Adams’ actual captivity assuming the role of
the
subversive implicit narrative. The subversive content is held in the
fact that
Adams’ narrative ultimately confounds any assumption about race. His
mother was
‘mulatto,’ so Adams’ skin was certainly darker than most Americans, and
he was
indeed labeled African-American and yet when Joseph Dupuis first saw
Adams he
noted “the appearance, features and dress of this man upon his arrival
at
Mogadore, so perfectly resembled those of an Arab.”[29]
Furthermore, when the people of Timbuktu take
Adams captive, he notes that he “could not hear that any white man but
themselves had ever been seen in the place.”[30]

In
the mid-nineteenth century, while the United States was in a bitter
debate
about the question of black slavery, “white intellectuals also battled
over the
concept of ‘race’ as a significant category.”[31]
Adams’ narrative then, in which he is at once
represented as Black, White and Arab, presented a problematic situation
for those
who held that “race was a biological
determinant,” and instead strongly suggests that race is “a rhetorical
ordering
principle imposed on people to make sense on the economic and political
hierarchies.”[32]
It is out of an ideology derived from these
hierarchies that the African Company’s economic desires, as many
imperial
projects, were instigated. The problem is that the representation of
the
Africans as barbarous assumes that they are biologically inferior to
the
English. To admit, as Adams’ shifting racial identity seems to suggest,
that
race is an imposed category is to admit that England is the imposer,
destroying
the possibility for their imperial pursuits to be in any way
just.

In
order to avoid this conflict, the imperial narrative subjects Adams’ to
a sort
of narrative captivity in order to disregard the contradictions
implicit in
England’s ideology. Commonly, in order to justify imperial acts, the
assailing
nation will depict the opposite people as subhuman or barbarous. For
this
reason, “Adams’ editor writes the account in the third person” so that
“his
thoughts and feelings are absent” thereby dehumanizing him and
disallowing the
typical narrative “plea for empathetic readerly response.”[33]
His dehumanization takes on racial
connotations in light of the fact that, though Adams notes that he
“never saw
the Negroes find any gold,” and that the city was not the glistening
capital of
riches as was commonly held, this fact was not accepted until a white
explorer
confirmed it years later.[34]

Once
he no longer held authorial status, “Adams’ account was carefully
sandwiched
between the editor’s justificatory preface and an overwhelming sheaf of
endnotes” because “white authentication was more important than black
story
telling, so that the ‘black message was sealed within a white
envelope’.”[35]
Effectively captured, the preface justifies
the narrative by appealing to the “hope that, the man [Adams] might be
rendered
useful to the government in the exploratory expedition then on its way
to
Africa.”[36]
Though England had already outlawed de
facto slavery,
there is a no apparent aversion to use Adams for its own profit.
Despite the
fact that Adams desperately wanted to return to America from England,
as the
two were about to go to war, the African Company “recommended [the
editor] to
omit no practicable means of securing the residence of Adams” in
England.[37]
The term “practicable” here is hazy at best
as it assumes a certain morality, which implodes through the immorality
of the
act of narration. According to Edward Said, “the power to narrate, or
to block
other narratives from forming and emerging is very important to the
culture of
imperialism.”[38]
Thus, by subjugating Adams’ to narrative
slavery, blocking the narrative of race as a construction as opposed to
biological
inferiority from forming or emerging, England instigated and reinforced
their
imperial assumption of dominance through narrative.

It
to this end, the movement toward the construction of imperial
justifications,
that the captivity narratives progressed. Interestingly, the dual
voices of the
narratives document, not only a physical captivity, but also a
socio-political
or socio-cultural captivity as well. In
this sense, the narratives become vessels of the ideologies of their
time,
enacting rigorous and profound, though subtle, cultural work on the
society in
which it was disseminated and thereby reinforcing the dominant
ideology.
Although Rowlandson initially attempted to subvert the dueling
master/slave
duality implicit in the narrative by praising an individualism set
apart from
the constraints of the dominant ideology, her narrative ultimately
failed to
dissemble the gender based power hierarchy. Instead, the captivity
narrative
alternately challenged and reinforced the dominant ideologies, leading
to the
explicitly imperial narrative of Robert Adams, causing socio-political
actors
to consistently expand their sphere of influence in order to maintain
power,
thereby leading toward a culture of imperialism.

Brandon
Weaver is a senior at the University of Washington in
English and the
Comparative History of Ideas program. He is broadly interested in the
social
function of narrative and is currently working on his undergraduate
thesis
concerning literature of the Roma. He was recently awarded the Eilert
Anderson
Scholarship by the English Department.